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Miami: Roberts County Museum

Photo by Rick Vanderpool

The Roberts County Museum, located in Miami, archives and displays the history (and pre-history) of the surrounding region. In fact, the museum’s collection resides in a building with its own share of history. The structure, erected in 1888, first served as a railroad depot for the Southern Kansas Railway Company of Texas (later purchased by the Santa Fe Railroad). When the line arrived in Roberts County in 1887, a campsite for workers - complete with kitchen and tent hotel - developed at the end of the track, giving rise to the community of Miami before the construction of the depot. Once completed, the depot remained in use by the railway line for almost one hundred years.

Today the restored depot features the local history of pioneers and Native Americans interpreted through surviving artifacts. The museum also houses a portion of the Mead Collection, an archive of prehistoric archaeological artifacts excavated in Roberts County. In 1934, J. A. Mead, a Miami local, amateur archaeologist and fossil collector, instigated a full-scale excavation by scientists from the University of Texas of an unusual site discovered by Charles Puckett on the C. R. Cowan Ranch. The excavation led to the discovery of a bone bed containing the remains of five mammoth and several projectile points from the Clovis culture, a prehistoric Paleo-Indian population that appeared after the last glacial period almost 12,000 years ago.